SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system. The HANA platform is fundamentally based on the principle of pushing down data-intensive computations into a HANA database layer in order to benefit from HANA's in-memory capabilities and to avoid unnecessary data transfers between the database layer and an application layer. Computations can be pushed down using, for example, SQL SCRIPT procedures, different types of database views, application functions, etc.
HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HANA DI) is a service layer of the HANA database that simplifies the deployment of HANA database objects by providing a declarative approach for defining database objects (as design-time artifacts) and ensuring a consistent deployment into the database, based on a transactional all-or-nothing deployment model and implicit dependency management. HANA DI is focused only on deployment aspects and addresses both development and modeling scenarios as part of the HANA database.
Upon the deployment of a HANA DI artifact, HANA DI will automatically calculate all dependent and already deployed database objects in order to re-deploy them to achieve a consistent target state. In some instances, re-deployment can result in execution of unnecessary or non-optimum operations which can adversely affect application development and installation times, application runtime, CPU load, and database traffic.